O Comic Con: AAR

This weekend in the Omaha area was fun for sci-fi/fantasy fans. The fourth annual O Comic Con was held at the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. If you’re wondering why Omaha’s comic convention was held in another state, only the Missouri River (and the Nebraska-Iowa state line) separate the two cities.

Mid-America Center is an impressive venue, seats about 7,000 in the main arena and has a nice convention center attached to it. Saturday was my first visit to both the arena and the Con. It won’t be my last.

There was a lot offered by this con. Plenty of vendors, interesting guests (the Cowboy from the Villiage People, a couple of actresses and several artists), a large game room, several rooms set up for a variety of panels and some very well done costumes by cosplayers.

The Elite Gang, Tom Floyd and yours truly at O Comic Con on Saturday.

I was only there for three hours, having been invited to join a panel. But it was long enough to reunite with an old friend, Tom Floyd. Tom was one of the creators of the comic book, Seadragon (Elite Comics, 1986), that I served as lead writer for on its first two issues. We talked about the last days of Elite, it didn’t end well, and caught up on what some of the other Elite alumni are up to.

But more importantly, we greenlighted two projects that any Seadragon/Epsilon Wave fans out there will be excited about. I’m writing a novelization of Seadragon, which will include two characters from the Epsilon Wave – Nightmare and Twilight. FBI Agent Brad Jefferies will be a major player and finally gets a backstory (he didn’t have one back in 1986 and it was on my to-do list back then).

It is Jefferies’ backstory that helps Tom resolve an issue he’s been having. He has a project he’s developing that is set in the 1930s and would like to have Jefferies be a part of it. But how to have a man pop up 50 years in the past is the question. What I have planned for Jefferies in the Seadragon novel should solve Tom’s problem too.

So, in 2019 expect some amazing things to come out of Nebraska on the Seadragon front.

But I was there having been invited to join a panel: Criticism, Culture and the Future of Entertainment. Dawn Witzke moderated and it was supposed to be a four-person panel. Unfortunately, we had two that could not make it so Dawn and I soldiered on.

We started with an audience of 12, picked up maybe six-to-eight more after we started, lost a few throughout as the panel went on.

But it was a great panel, in my humble opinion. We had some great questions from the audience, some good points made by both audience and panelists and when the hour was up, I think we pulled off a solid panel.

A disclaimer, this was the first time I’ve done a panel at a con so I don’t have much of a sample to judge by. But I’m looking into doing a panel or two in September when I’m at DragonCon and I can only hope they go as well as this one did.

So a big thank you to Dawn Witzke for inviting me. I hope I was more of a help than a hindrance. Thank you to all of those that attended and participated from the audience. I hope we answered your questions and gave you some good information.